State Party Position Taking: Elites Listening to Elites
Gerald C. Wright
Indiana University
Elizabeth Rigby
George Washington University
Abstract
We measure the economic and social policy preferences of state electorates (Annenberg 2000
and 2004 Election Surveys) and the state parties’ stances on the same policy dimensions (Project
Vote Smart NPATs) to see whether the inclusion of mass partisanship changes the recent
conclusions of governmental responsiveness to the affluent over middle and low income
constituents (Gilens 2005, Bartels 2008, Fiorina, et al. 2008, Rigby and Wright 2013). This has
been implied, but not tested, in recent work (Garand 2010, Enns 2015). We look at state party
responsiveness to income group preferences within the parties and find that (a) the preferences
of the affluent continue to dominate with the important exception of Republicans on social
policy, and (b) that the consequences of underrepresentation of partisans’ preferences by their
parties’ platforms varies systematically by party and policy dimension. Lower income
Democrats are underrepresented on social policy—the state Democratic parties are relatively
more liberal and aligned with the preferences of high income Democrats. Lower income
Republicans are underrepresented on economic policy where the state parties are relatively
more conservative because they align with the preferences of affluent Republicans.
Paper prepared for delivery at the 2016 American Political Science Association conference, Philadelphia,
PA, September 1-4, 2016.
Introduction
Most thinking about democracy assumes the ideal of government that is responsive “to the
preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals” (Dahl 1971). How far we are in practice from
this ideal is one of the central themes in contemporary political analyses. The apparent consensus of
political science, at least as it pertains to the U.S. until recently, has been that (a) elected officials worry
about reelection and (b) this leads them to pay attention to their constituents. The conclusion from a
lot of empirical work has been the public opinion matters, at least on issues salient to the public
(Erikson, et al. 1993, Canes-Wrone, et al. 2002, Erikson, et al. 2002, Ansolabehere and Jones 2010). That
relatively upbeat view has been challenged by recent analyses which have reframed the traditional
question of “does public opinion matter?” Instead, these researchers have asked “whose opinions
matter?” Using quite different methodologies (Bartels 2008, Gilens 2005, Gilens 2012, Gilens and Page
2014, Rigby and Wright 2013) they find that the rich or affluent have a lot more say than the middle
class, and the poor have no detectible independent influence on legislators or public policy at all.
Interestingly, the message of these works is consistent with a long line of elite theorists from Lippman
(1922) to Schattschneider (1960) to Converse (1964), all of whom argue in different ways that the mass
electorate is not up to the task of providing meaningful public control over public policy. However, this
new research on income inequality has drawn a lot of attention because the findings rest on the same
kinds of evidence that researchers have used for years to suggest that government is reasonably
responsive to public opinion.
The most recent wrinkle in the line of work examining income inequality and governmental
responsiveness brings party and partisanship into play. Of course partisanship is central to
understanding mass attitudes and preferences as well as the policy behavior of elected officials, and
some recent work argues that partisanship is so important that it largely swamps inequalities based on
income (Garand 2010, Enns 2015). The idea here is that it is not the rich who are overrepresented so
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much as the partisans whose candidates are elected (Wright 1989b, Clinton 2006, Brunner, et al. 2011).
Such a conclusion has very different normative implications—ones that we believe are less troubling
than the argument that the wealthy have most of the power and the poor have virtually none. In this
paper we examine the argument that bringing parties and partisanship into the analysis mitigates the
problem of undue influence by the wealthy, but doing so with methods and data much more in line with
the long line of research on representation. We find that the parties are primarily responsive to the
wealthy—with one significant exception--but that the degree of underrepresentation varies by party
and policy dimension.
The paper proceeds as follows, we briefly outline the development of research on who is
represented which provides the foundation for our analysis of within party income group effects on
state party positioning. The next section describes the data, measures and estimation strategy that we
employ, which is followed by four short analyses: a replication of unequal income group
representation, a demonstration of the importance of partisans for party positioning, assessing withinparty equality of income group influence, and finally an exploration of the results of the previous
analysis to show how party and issue dimension condition misrepresentation of partisans by their own
parties.
Does the Public Matter? Conflicting Views
Virtually everyone believes that democracy is preferable to most of the alternatives, but there is
less than total agreement on what constitutes a democracy. Without getting into the thicket of various
strands of democratic theory, we will simply posit that most recognizable visions of democratic
government involve government being responsive to the wishes of the governed. “Unless mass views
have some place in the shaping of politics, all the talk about democracy is nonsense.”(Key 1961)
Establishing whether there is such linkage between the public and government has, of course, been the
work of many scholars and writers because the question of the role of the public in policy making has
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such momentous normative importance. Some influential writers like Walter Lippman (1922) dwell on
the limitation of people’s cognitive abilities to deal with the complexities of the world, arguing that
instead we construct artificial images of the world that are hopelessly subjective and biased. The
informational limitations of the average citizen were documented in the first systematic election surveys
by Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues (Lazarsfeld, et al. 1948, Berelson 1954), by authors of The American
Voter (Campbell, et al. 1960) and even more thoroughly in their exhaustive coverage of available public
opinion resources Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) demonstrated that if Americans have opinions on
many issues, they are founded on woefully little knowledge. This echoed in broad outlines the seminal
report by Phillip Converse (1964) on the lack of ideological thinking in the mass public, arguing that the
average voter’s attitudes on even important issues of the day were best characterized as “nonattitudes.” Thus, the early and most empirical work since has cast a picture of the average citizen as
disinterested, uninformed with claims to issue stances that are generally fleeting, and certainly not
grounded in any kind of systematic framework or set of principles. Thus a lot of empirical evidence can
me marshalled to support the quite unflattering portrait of the electorate inherited from writers from
Lippman (1922), Schattschneider (1960) and others.1
The fact that the average survey respondent falls well short of some idealized democratic citizen
has not stopped efforts to assess whether government is responsive to public opinion. The classic study
here is Miller and Stokes’ “Constituency Influence in Congress” (1963) which sought to determine
whether and how members of Congress aligned their attitudes and roll call behavior with opinion in
their districts on race, social welfare and foreign policy issues. While that initial effort has some
methodological problems (Achen 1977, 1978, Erikson 1978, 1981) subsequent efforts generally
concluded, that in spite of the public’s lack of interest, information and real attitudes, there exists
considerable correspondence between districts’ ideological orientations and the roll call voting of
members of Congress (Erikson and Wright 1980, Wright and Berkman 1986, Erikson and Wright 2000,
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Ansolabehere, et al. 2001, Canes-Wrone, et al. 2002, Erikson and Wright 2009, Ansolabehere and Jones
2010, Hollibaugh, et al. 2013, Canes-Wrone 2015, Hall 2015, Sulkin, et al. 2015, Miler 2016) and even
state legislatures (Hogan 2004, 2008, Birkhead 2015). Beyond legislative voting, studies of state policy
(Erikson, et al. 1993) and national policy making over time (Erikson, et al. 2002) add up to a large body of
work which indicates that indeed, even without attentive, well-informed citizens, elected officials are
reasonably responsive to public preferences. Interesting, as the methods and data sources have
developed in quantity and sophistication, the evidence for responsiveness appears to be even stronger
(Ansolabehere and Jones 2010).
All of this seems to be kind of good news for democracy. It appears that we achieve Key’s goal
of public opinion having an impact on elected officials and policy and does so without meeting the high
requirements of an informed, attentive, and principled electorate. But virtually all of these studies have
considered the question in one form or another of “does public opinion matter” and as a consequence
for the most part treats public opinion as a single organic entity. That is, for example, members of
Congress have a district, and many models assume the appropriate representation is the median (or
more often mean) voter. And given this question, the evidence indicates that public opinion does
indeed matter. Some exceptions to this have looked at different constituencies, asking the question of
“whose opinions matter” with the idea that responsiveness may be not to some magical median voter,
but rather may favor strategically significant sub-constituencies. Some have looked and found partisan
biases in representation (Wright 1989b, Clinton 2006, Brady 2007, BAFUMI and HERRON 2010). Given
the high levels of party polarization today, it is of little surprise that partisans in a constituency are
better represented when their representative or senator is of the same party. This is not the
“democratic” ideal of “continued responsiveness of government to the preferences of its citizens,
considered as political equals” (Dahl 1971). However, given a significant choice (ideological distance)
between candidates and parties—which many consider a necessary condition of popular control—and
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the candidates are more or less equal distance from the modal voter, it is pretty much impossible for
elected officials to be fully congruent with the preferences of the median or mean voter.2
The more bothersome news comes from the studies mentioned earlier with their take on
question of “whose opinions matter?” In Martin Gilens (2005, Fiorina, et al. 2008, Gilens 2011) mapped
the preferences of citizens on over 1,800 policy questions and matched these to policies passed by the
national government. He reports an overwhelming pattern in which national policies are much more
likely to change consistent with the preferences of the affluent (90th percentile in income) than those of
the median wage earners or the poor (10th percentile). Larry Bartels comes to the same conclusion in
examining the responsiveness of Senate roll call voting to different income groups: Senators are quite
responsive to their better off constituents (upper third), much less so to middle income constituents and
virtually not at all to the least well-off of those they supposedly represent. Building on these findings,
Elizabeth Rigby and I (Rigby and Wright 2013) focused on the states, and in particular positioning of
state parties. We found a pattern of relative influence that largely mirrored those of Gilens and of
Bartels. In studies that systematically contrast the influence of elites, experts, organized interests and
public opinion, the public comes out way behind in terms of its relative influence (Jacobs and Page 2005,
Gilens and Page 2014). The rich clearly have disproportionate influence, the middle income group’s
influence much less and less consistent, and the independent influence of the poor is virtually is nonexistent. More recently, work has extended the question of relative responsiveness in parliamentary
systems and the findings echo what has been found in the U.S.: Legislators do much better at heeding
the wishes of the well-heeled (Stadelmann, et al. 2015).
The Role of Parties
Three economists offer an interesting and plausible challenge to this overall conclusion of the
underrepresentation of the poor. Brunner et al. (2010) use referenda voting of precincts in California,
stratified by income, and relate these to state legislators’ voting on same referenda. Their study
5
compares high and low income precincts’ voting across 77 referenda, and they compare this to the
voting on these by the members of the state Assembly and Senate. They focus on the place of parties in
representation, and they conclude there is overrepresentation of the poor when Democrats win and
overrepresentation of high income folks when Republicans win; thus parties swamp differences among
income groups in terms of misrepresentation.
Peter Enns (2015) argues that income groups preferences are so similar that we achieve pretty
good representation “by coincidence,” although this argument is strongly disputed by Gilens (2015).
Most relevant for our purposes is Enns’ argument that such coincidental representation is quite unlikely
for partisans since their preferences are so divergent. The implication we draw is that since people are
sorted by partisanship much more effectively than by income, and similarly because officials presumably
are more aligned with their own partisans, that we should find minimal, if any differences in
representation of income groups within the parties.
This brings us to the central question of this analysis. Does inequality of representation vanish
when we control for the party affiliation of citizens as well as that of elected officials? The setting for
this study is positions of the states parties on two policy dimensions: economic and social issues. In an
earlier analysis we established that the poor are not well represented, and indeed not represented at all
in terms of independent influence on the positions of the parties (Rigby and Wright 2013). Our
hypothesis is that controlling for party identification will reveal inequality of responsiveness to be
minimal.
This equality of party responsiveness to partisans’ preferences across income groups could
occur through two mechanisms. First, it might be that after party/issues sorting, income is no longer
related to issue preferences. If so, then empirically we cannot distinguish differential responsiveness
because there is no longer any systematic within party variance in issue preferences associated with
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income. The second possibility is that the parties are responsive to their partisans’ preferences
regardless of income. That is, the ideal of equal influence could be achieved within parties.
There is a counter hypothesis that the same sort of resource differences that give the wealthy
and better educated an edge in virtually every type of political participation operates within parties just
as it does everywhere else. This pessimistic conjecture has going for it that within the context of U.S.
politics there are no significant cases that we know of that run counter to the exhaustive finding of
Schlozman, Verba and Brady (1999, 2012) that greater resources translate in to more effective political
voice.
Data and Measures.
Our assessment of the impact inequalities in party responsiveness to different income groups
requires measures, at the state level, of mass preferences as well as the positions of the parties on same
issue dimensions.
Preferences of the State Electorates. For the mass data we are using the National Annenberg
election surveys of 2000 (N=58,373) and 2004 (N=81,422). The data collected include a large number of
survey respondents from the 48 continental states, with all but five states having at least 500
respondents across the two survey years.3 The limitation of these Annenberg survey data is that
respondents were interviewed across a series of rolling, cross-sectional surveys in which different sets of
(somewhat overlapping) questions were asked of each cross-section. To generate measures of policy
preferences across these surveys, we pooled the surveys for 2000 into one dataset and the surveys from
2004 into a second merged dataset. For each pooled dataset we identified a set of commonly asked
policy items in each survey. These included 30 items from the 2000 surveys and 28 items from the 2004
surveys—all asking about respondents’ positions on a range of issues: economic, health and social
welfare, social/moral, energy and environment, campaign finance, and legal/ethical concerns. Since all
respondents were not asked all questions, we imputed the missing data using imputation by multiple
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chained equations (see Royston 2005), which predicts survey participants’ responses based on their
preferences among items they were asked.
Following our earlier work (Rigby and Wright 2011, 2013), we extract two dimensions from the
Annenberg surveys, one set of issues to tap the dimension of economic policy preferences and one
tapping social issues. The former includes respondents’ preferences on tax policy, health care, social
welfare and K-12 school funding. The latter encompassed abortion, the death penalty, gay rights, school
prayer and gun control. The specific items used are listed in Table 1 of the appendix. The methods used
are straightforward. After the imputation of missing values for questions that were not asked on specific
surveys, we factor analyzed the items constituting the two dimensions separately for 2000 and 2004,
using the first dimension (with eigenvalues from 1.58 to 3.22 and second eigenvalues below .50.4 The
factor scores are standardized (mean=0, std dev =1.0). To get state and income groups averages we
combined the 2000 and 2004 survey files for an overall working N of 136,056.
Our approach here is to analyze responsiveness in terms of two of the large dimensions of
conflict in American politics. While a lot of work examines the American policy space as one large
liberal-conservative continuum at both the elite (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) and mass levels
(Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2013), there remain good reasons to examine the separate issue
dimensions of economic and social policy. One that is directly relevant to our analysis of income groups
is that higher incomes signal more conservative preferences on economic policy, but more liberal
stances on social policy. In trying to sort out how income groups are represented, these contrary
associations could obviously confound the analysis. These differences are evident in Figure 1 which
shows the results of fitting a simple linear model for income (grouped into low, medium, and high
terciles).
(Figure 1 about here)
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It is clear that income group preferences are associated with the two issue dimensions in the
mass public with opposite signs. In addition, we can see that the estimated confidence intervals for
economic policy preferences are smaller indicating that income is more strongly related to that
dimension, and less to preferences on social issues.
The second reason for looking at the economic and social dimensions separately is they have
different relative relationships to individual income and geographic location. More of the variance in
economic preferences is within states and with smaller differences across the states. In contrast, social
policy preferences are more strongly correlated with location. These differences are summarized in
Table 1 which compares predictive power of income and place (state of residence) for the two
dimensions. Not surprisingly, the overall R2s are quite low, but the differences are politically
consequential. First looking at income we see the same pattern observed in Figure 1: income is more
strongly related to economic policy preferences. In contrast, state of residence explains over three times
as much of the variance in social policy preferences as is the case for economic issues.5
There are at least three ways to estimate the policy preferences of different income groups
across the states. One is to separate respondents by reported income. If we want to compare say high,
medium and low income groups’ preferences, respondents can be divided by their answers to the
survey income questions. The problem here is that the distributions of responses to income questions
in surveys do not conveniently break into nice thirds, necessitating the use of weights in regression
equations to account for the different sizes of the income groups (Bartels 2008, Chap. 9, Bhatti and
Erikson 2011). Two alternatives offer more straightforward interpretations of income group effects.
One, which we used in an earlier analysis (Rigby and Wright 2013, and Table 1 this analysis), allocates
the respondents’ proportionally into equal thirds.6 The second is a method developed by Gilens (2005)
which he calls “imputing preferences by income” works better in this analysis where we want to
estimate not just state income terciles’ preferences, but rather to get the preferences of Democratic and
9
Republican identifiers within terciles. Giles’ innovation was to estimate issue preferences by first
regressing preferences on income (and income squared), and then for his analyses to estimate from that
equation the preferences of the 90th, 50th and 10th percentile’s preferences on individual issues. In our
case, we calculated respondent’s incomes in terms of percentiles by state, assigning the mean percentile
(p) to respondents according to their answers to the nine income categories of the Annenberg surveys.
Then for each state, we regressed preferences (economic or social) on p and p2. Using these equations,
we estimate (impute) the preferences for the 17th, 50th and 83rd percentiles to represent the median
preference of the three terciles. These are highly correlated with the alternative measures of income
group preferences discussed above: r>.95 in each case.
Measures of State Party Positions. Party ideology here is that which stems from the collective
issue stances of parties’ candidates in each state. This gauges the policy profiles the parties present to
voters which we believe is better than relying platform statements which are seldom seen and which
have little impact on what the candidates’ actually stand for or what elected officials do in office. We
use actual campaign positions rather than inferences of positions based on roll call votes. This bases the
measures on the positions of losers as well as winners, and has the advantage over roll calls of not being
affected by distortions due to differences in partisan control, agenda setting or other legislative
procedures that vary across the states.
We pool data collected by Project Vote Smart (PVS) that administers the candidate
questionnaires—formerly called the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT) and currently terms
Political Courage Tests (PCT). We use responses collected over the period 1995-2005 from candidates
for Congress, governor and the state legislatures (N=18,467). Aggregated over the years, we have
healthy sized candidate samples on which to estimate party ideologies, ranging from 115 in Louisiana to
968 in New Hampshire with a mean N of 373. Like the Annenberg surveys, the questions asked in the
PVS questionnaires vary some from state to state and over time. However, there is a good deal of
10
overlap across the 255 surveys which we draw on. We base our measures on the 87 questions that
were asked of at least half of the respondents. Missing responses are imputed using the same chained
imputation strategy employed for the mass surveys.
After imputation, we factor analyzed subsects of the items (25 economic policy items related to
redistribution, social spending and the safety net and 20 items relating to abortion, gun control, civil
rights and school prayer) to achieve summary party positions on economic and social issues. (See Rigby
and Wright, 2013 for a complete explanation and description of these measures.)
Results: Unequal Representation
The first thing we do is replicate our earlier results which showed that the poor have no direct
impact of party preferences. The difference in our current analysis is that we are using the 2004 as well
as the 2000 Annenberg surveys, and the reason for this is to have the larger N for more reliable
estimates for the income group X party X state groups.
In the analysis of income group representation, we examine two aspects of the relationship
between citizens and the states parties. One is alignment which asks simply whether the relative
positions of the parties across the states coincide with that of the preferences of the different income
groups. Alignment measures do not make any claim about influence, just congruence. The second
measure, influence, assesses groups’ impact on party positions controlling for the preferences of other
groups. That is, when the groups disagree, which seems to have the greatest impact on the positioning
of the parties? Figure 2 replicates the findings for influence. Plotted in the figure are the estimated
regression coefficients (solid dots) and their 95 percent confidence intervals (solid lines) that result from
regressing the state party economic issues and social issues scores on the estimated preferences of the
income group thirds in the states. Note, this just replicates our earlier analysis and does not consider the
respondents’ own party identifications.
(Figure 2 about here)
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Comparing our results from the Annenberg 2000 and the combined 2000 and 2004 data we see
that the patterns of income group influence is virtually unchanged. The lowest income groups never
have any independent effect on either economic or social party positioning. The highest income group
clearly sets the agenda for both parties in the states on economic issues. Similarly, the affluent are the
only group with independent influence on the Democratic parties on social issues. The one exception to
the rule by the rich that we find is the Republican Party on social issues where middle income groups’
preferences appear to have more influence than either the poor or the affluent.
Now that we have determined that working with the larger data set does not do violence to the
patterns of unequal income group influence we reported earlier, we can bring in the parties in the
electorate. The reasons for doing so are so obvious that they hardly need to be mentioned. We know
that, although policy moderation tends to pay off for candidates (Erikson and Wright 1980, CanesWrone, et al. 2002, Erikson and Wright 2009, Ansolabehere and Jones 2010), they nevertheless do not
converge to anything like the median voter (Wright 1989b, Clinton 2006); in fact, all of the evidence
suggests that the parties are diverging, both at the national and state levels (Poole and Rosenthal 1997,
Bogle 2005, Shor 2014). Thus, we expect to find that the parties play to their respective bases, perhaps
with a nod as well to the preferences of independents (Wright 1989b). Given the polarization of
partisans in the mass public, and the tendency to unfavorably perceive members of the opposition party
(Hetherington and Rudolph , Abramowitz 2010, Shor and McCarty 2011), we would be surprised to find
that the state parties are affected by the issue preferences of any partisans other than their own.
Our expectations are largely born out in Table 2 which shows the results of regressing party
economic and social ideologies on Democratic, Republican and independent identifiers’ economic and
social policy preferences. The state parties’ positions on economic policy are clearly responsive to their
own partisans; the Democratic Party positions reflect the ordering of Democratic partisans and the same
for Republicans. Reflecting strategies of playing to the base, the preferences of the other party and
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independents have no independent impact. The pattern for the parties’ positions on social issues is a
bit different. On the Republican side it is clear that only the Republican identifiers in the states matter.
For the Democratic parties in the states, in contrast, it appears that the preferences of both parties
matter, although the coefficient for Democratic identifiers is larger.
(Table 2 about here)
The preferences of partisans are nicely reflected in the positions of the state parties. Even for
economic policy for which intra-party inter-state differences are quite attenuated, the state parties still
tend to be congruent with the differences among their partisans. The inter-state variances in the state
parties’ social positions is greater, and this helps to account for the much higher explained variance in
state social policy ideologies (R2 =.79 social vs .23 economic for Democrats and .62 social versus .38
economic for Republicans). Thus, we see the not surprising result that partisans’ preferences matter for
their parties’ stances on economic and social issues. The causal connection here is necessarily murky
since it is difficult to disentangle rational party choice based on issues from the processes of projection
and rationalization (Achen and Bartels 2016, espec Chaps 2 & 10). While such psychological processes
are no doubt at work for some of the electorate, it is probably less for large dimensions of policies such
as the economic and social policy measures we are using than it would be for things like presidential
approval, or opinions on whether the deficit has increased or not.
Income and Party
This takes us to address our main question: Does consideration of party affiliation in the
electorate mitigate the disproportionate responsiveness of parties and elected officials to the affluent?
The hopeful hypothesis is that the economic distortions in representation disappear. Brunner et al.
(2013) conclude that electing Democrats results in even an overrepresentation of the poor and electing
Republicans an overrepresentation of the affluent.
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We repeat the analysis of responsiveness to income group preferences, but now within the
parties. We begin by getting estimates of the mean income tercile opinion among Democratic identifiers
(including leaners) and among Republican identifiers (including leaders). The first step is to run
regressions for economic and for social preferences as the dependent variables, with a dummy for party
(independents excluded), the respondent’s income percentile in her state and percentile squared.7 We
then use the coefficients from these regressions to get predicted values for the policy attitudes of the
low, middle and high income groups within each party and states. This is done simply by taking
predictions from substituting the values of .17, .50, and .83 for the percentile variable.
Then, within parties, we again regress the state party ideologies on income group preferences.
The results in Figure 3 show within the parties both our alignment and influence measures. (Table 2A in
the appendix provides the full regression output). The results are clear for economic policy: the state
parties are influenced by the preferences of those partisans in the top income bracket. In terms of
alignment, the preferences of the low income partisans are positive, but the coefficients are smaller
than the alignment coefficient for the top income group, and not even statistically significant for low
income Democrats or Republicans. For influence the impact of the affluent is evident, both in terms of
stronger slopes and significance. For economic policy positioning, it really does appear to be a case of
the elites listening to the elites. The extent to which lower income groups get what they want from
their parties on economic policy appears to be instances of “representation by coincidence” (Gilens and
Page 2014, Gilens 2015), although we have more to say about that below.
The pattern for social policy is the same for Democrats. The alignment of preferences and policy
are almost the same when we look at the slopes (1.6, 1.7 and 1.9 from Table A2), but the ability to
account for variance in the Democratic parties’ social policy positions increases with income (.57, .71
and .79). In the Figure (lower left plot) we see that only the preferences of the top group matter. So for
social policy among Democrats, the reframe is the same, elites listening to elites.
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(Figure 3 about here)
The exception to our pattern of the parties attending to the preferences of the affluent comes
with Republicans on social policy. Our earlier analysis, which omitted public partisanship (Rigby and
Wright 2013 and Figure 2, this analysis), found that Republican social policies were most responsive to
the middle class in the state electorates. Here we see that this carries through; it is the middle income
Republicans who have the most influence on social policies of the state Republican parties. This seems
to support Thomas Frank’s (Frank 2004) argument that the Republican party has grown in adherents by
appealing to the relatively conservative social values of the middle class. In the multidimensional
Republican world the state parties reflect the preferences of rich Republicans on economic policy, but
middle income Republicans on social policies.
This simple pattern is entirely consistent with the long term growth of Republicanism in mass
public. As long as the New Deal coalition held and the chief differences between the parties centered on
economic issues, the Republican Party, with its reputation of favoring the affluent, remained a minority
party. With the extension of the party differences to race and then social issues from the 1960s and
beyond, more and more of the electorate found that, on balance, they favored the Republican Party
(Layman and Carsey 2002). It is hard to see how the story of partisan change of recent decades can be
told without acknowledging the role of social issues in the Republican gains among the mass electorate.
Our analysis of responsiveness within the parties does not change the fundamental story of the
positioning of parties and legislative candidates: most of the time the high resource folks are attended
to, with the important exception of that the Republican parties bend to their middle income partisans’
conservative preferences on social issues. We argue this was central to their increased numbers in the
electorate and that this increase is reflected in the election of more Republicans, and that has served
the goals of affluent Republicans on economic policy.
Party and Misrepresentation
15
We finish with a look at the differences in policy preferences between income groups within the
parties. Above we suggested that more equal representation should result within parties if the income
group differences are greatly attenuated. If the poor Democrats (Republicans) want the same level of
government involvement as the affluent Democrats (Republicans), then it is a bit less bothersome if the
influence is slanted toward the better off (Enns 2015). On the other hand, if there are significant
differences between income groups within the parties, then an imbalance in responsiveness means that
the poor have parties that are not offering up the kinds of social or economic policy they want.
To assess consensus or disagreement between income groups in the parties we estimate simple
quadratic regressions of social and economic policy preferences for Democrats and for Republicans on
income percentile. There is a distinct asymmetry between the parties which yields and interesting story
of who gets represented when the parties win. The results are presented graphically in Figure 4 which
plots the estimated economic and social policy preferences of Democrats and Republicans along with
their 95 percent confidence intervals. For economic policy we see there is only the barest relationship
between income and Democrats’ preferences. Here we assume that that when the parties gain control
of state government, they enact policies which reflect candidates’ stands. Given this, then all Democrats
should be pretty much satisfied with economic policies (at least with respect to income) that their
parties would enact, even though our results suggest that those policies are influenced by high income
Democrats.
This is in sharp contrast to Republicans. Low and middle income Republicans are substantially
more moderate in their economic policy preferences than are the best off Republicans who are
distinctly conservative. And since we have shown that the Republican parties in the states are solely
responsive to the affluent in their party, we would expect that all those state legislatures where the
Republican Party gained control after the 2010 election to have enacted economic policy favored by
really only a small fraction of the electorate. To summarize, Democrats pretty much agree on economic
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policies that are distinctly more liberal than those favored by Republicans, but are not much different
from one Democratic income group to the next. Thus, the Democratic parties are likely to be pretty
evenly representative of their partisans, regardless of income. Republicans, in contrast, differ in their
economic policy preferences with the well-off being clearly more conservative.
The pattern of misrepresentation of party positions relative to their partisans is just the
opposite for social policies. In the right side of Figure 4 we see that affluent Democrats are especially
liberal, with preferences becoming more moderate in virtually a linear fashion with declining income.
Hence, since the affluent Democrats influence their state parties, we expect that when Democrats
control state government that their policies would be a good deal more liberal than preferred by their
less well-off supporters, not to mention Republicans in the electorate. Republicans on social policy look
a lot like Democrats do on economic policy in terms the relationship between income and preferences.
High resource Republicans are more moderate, and the quadratic curve is evidence that the middle
income Republicans are the most conservative income group on social issues. However, the differences
by income are not large at all. Thus, when Republicans can dictate social policy in the states, it is likely
to be more conservative than the tastes of most Democrats, but only modestly more conservative than
the preferences of low and high income Republicans.
Conclusions
We extend the line of research which asks if the quality of representation depends on the
incomes of voters. We use the states as research laboratories, examining the responsiveness of the
state political parties on the dimensions of economic and social policies. We take the analysis beyond
our previous work which suggested that indeed, the state parties are more responsive to the affluent,
with the exception of the Republican parties which seemed to heed middle income group preferences.
Some scholars have suggested that when partisanship is taken into account that the inequalities in
17
responsiveness to income groups are much less important; partisan differences swamp the much
smaller differences in preferences between income groups.
We do find that the state parties are much more responsive to the preferences of their own
partisans than those of independents or the other party’s supporters, and those differences are
substantial just as we would expect in the era of polarized parties. Nevertheless, when we examine the
impact of income groups within the parties, we see a continued pattern of inequality, on both parties’
stances on economic issues, and the Democratic parties’ stances on social issues. The well-off in the
parties call the shots. The one exception is that the state Republican parties appear to be influenced
most, indeed only, by the social preferences of their middle income supporters. Thus, while there is no
denying the huge impact of partisanship—indeed leaving it out of the analysis is like ignoring the
proverbial 800 pound elephant in the room. But even with partisanship squarely in the analysis, the
parties reflect the issue stances of their better off partisans.
Does this matter? Do partisans get “coincidental representation”? That depends on the issue
and party. Take the instance where Democrats win control of state governments, and the parties are
heeding the preferences of their most affluent supporters. On economic policies pursued, we would
expect them to be more liberal than the median voter in the state, but pretty much all Democrats, at
least with respect to income, would be reasonably well represented. However, on the social dimension,
the party’s policies reflect the much more liberal preferences of affluent Democrats; less well-off
Democrats, not to mention Republicans would be less pleased the with direction of social policies under
Democratic regimes.
Of course, as we explained above, Republican control would result in more, perhaps much more
conservative social policies, but these would not be drastically out of line with Republicans throughout
the income spectrum. However, on economic policies which reflect high income earners’ preferences,
we expect the policies to be a lot more conservative than Democrats want, of course, but also some
18
distance from the more moderate preferences of lower income Republicans. Thus, we have ample
evidence that the wealthy, more often than not, do call the shots, but that whether this
disproportionate party responsiveness produces less representative policies depends on the party in
power and the policy dimension being considered. Democrats in power are expected to enact social
policies that are too liberal for many of their supporters, but give them the economic policies close to
what they like. Republicans, in contrast, give their partisans the social policies that are a bit more
conservative than their wealthy prefer, but when it comes to economic policies, the Republican parties
give the affluent what they want.
19
Table 1. Income and Place (State) as Predictors, R2, of Citizen Ideology
Regression Model
Economic Issues Index
Social Issues Index
Income terciles (dummies) alone
.016
.0042
Place (46 state dummies) alone
.008
.031
Income and Place
.024
.035
Source: 2000 & 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys. Individual Level, N=131,069. All
coefficients and full models are significant at <.001.
Table 2. Effects of Partisans’ Preferences
on State Party Economic and Social Ideologies
Economic Issues
Group Preferences Dem Parties
Rep Parties
Social Issues
Dem Parties
Rep Parties
Democrats
0.950**
(0.431)
0.570
(0.510)
1.179***
(0.238)
-0.00956
(0.238)
Independents
0.413
(0.281)
-0.108
(0.332)
-0.207
(0.342)
-0.109
(0.341)
Republicans
-0.193
(0.234)
1.185***
(0.276)
0.850***
(0.259)
1.331***
(0.259)
Constant
0.197
(0.169)
-0.362*
(0.200)
0.431***
(0.134)
-0.115
(0.134)
47
0.789
47
0.620
Observations
R-squared
47
0.231
47
0.384
Standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
20
.05
0
-.05
-.1
-.1
0
Linear Prediction
.1
.1
Social Ideology
.2
Economic Ideology
-.2
Linear Prediction
Figure 1
Predicted Ideologies from Simple
Income Dummies with 95% C.I.s
Low
Middle
Income Group
High
21
Low
Middle
Income Group
High
Figure 2
Replicating Income Group Effects on Party Ideologies
Economic Issues
Dem Parties 2000
Dem Parties 2000 & 2004
Repub Parties 2000
Repub Parties 2000 & 2004
Low Income
Mid Income
High Income
Low Income
Mid Income
High Income
-2
0
2
4
-2
0
2
4
Social Issues
Dem Parties 2000
Dem Parties 2000 & 2004
Repub Parties 2000
Repub Parties 2000 & 2004
Low Income
Mid Income
High Income
Low Income
Mid Income
High Income
-2
0
2
4
-2
0
2
4
Figure 3
Within Party Income Group Effects on Party Positions
Republican Parties Economic Policy
Democratic Parties Economic Policy
Alignment
Influence
Alignment
LowIncome
LowIncome
MidIncome
MidIncome
HighIncome
HighIncome
-2
-1
0
1
2
-2
-1
0
1
2
Democratic Parties Social Issues
Alignment
-1
Influence
MidIncome
MidIncome
HighIncome
HighIncome
1
2
3
-1
0
1
2
-1
Alignment
LowIncome
0
1
0
1
2
Republican Parties Social Issues
LowIncome
-1
0
Influence
2
3
-1
22
0
1
Influence
2
-1
0
1
2
Figure 4
Income and Partisans' Policy Preferences
Social Policy Preferences
.4
.2
.6
.4
Economic Policy Preferences
Democrats
0
-.2
.2
0
Democrats
-.2
-.4
Republicans
-.4
-.6
Republicans
0
.2
.4
.6
Income Percentile
.8
1
23
0
.2
.4
.6
Income Percentile
.8
1
APPENDIX
Table A1: Policy Issue Items Used to Generate Economic and Social Liberalism Scales
Raw
N
Range
Liberal Position (pre-input
<$10K
>$150K
N
<$10K >$150K
F
Economic Policy Liberalism (2000)
Inheritance tax should be cut (Q113a & Q113b)
Should spend on health care for uninsured (Q111b)
Should spend on Medicare (Q111g)
Favor universal health care for children (Q91d)
Should spend on Medicaid (Q111h)
Should reduce income differences (Q136e)
Should spend on aid to mothers with young children (Q111e)
18,292
55,549
24,501
29,084
24,317
23,758
24,055
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
3
3
1
3
1
3
63%
80%
81%
91%
73%
69%
66%
75%
61%
57%
76%
47%
26%
43%
14.79
100.93
60.09
54.29
67.93
156.76
46.54
Social Policy Liberalism (2000)
Favor restricting abortion (Q91b & Q38c)
Should ban abortion (Q136a)
Favor death penalty (Q268b)
Favor gays in the military (Q268c)
Should stop job discrimination against gays (Q110a)
Should allow school prayer (Q136d)
54,876
24,010
29,496
27,955
54,767
24,139
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
3
1
58%
66%
35%
56%
52%
27%
78%
88%
25%
66%
37%
59%
84.93
68.07
26.67
6.67
15.28
96.81
13,637
19,662
19,569
18,650
28,317
35,149
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
3
1
1
3
3
65%
86%
92%
83%
79%
48%
70%
65%
75%
65%
67%
27%
3.14
48.92
36.31
41.81
21.98
110.58
56,919
22,040
16,076
55,717
17,052
31,281
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
3
1
3
3
3
42%
38%
67%
43%
18%
69%
60%
38%
77%
45%
27%
62%
101.22
4.77
8.88
18.10
37.28
13.57
Economic Policy Liberalism (2004)
Favor Eliminating Estate Tax (Q48 & Q74 & Q75)
Favor Spending More on Health Insurance (Q38)
Favor Health Insurance for Children (Q62 & Q77)
Favor Health Insurance for Workers (Q63 & Q78)
Favor Assistance to schools (Q35)
Should reduce income differences (Q22)
Social Policy Liberalism (2004)
Favor banning all abortions (Q20)
Favor banning all late-term abortions (Q25 & Q26)
Favor stem cell funding (Q65 & Q66 & Q83 & Q84)
Favor marriage ammendment (Q17)
Favor allowing same sex marriage (Q656 & Q 657)
Favor gun control (Q32)
Note: Descriptive statistics from datasets prior to imputing for missing values. Income group
responses indicate the percent of each income group selecting the most liberal response option for
each item. F statistics drawn from one-way ANOVA tests across all nine income categories. F
statistics for each question are significant at p<.05
24
Table 2A. Within-Party Income Group Effects on State Party Policy Positions
Part A
Dem Partisans’
Preferences
Low Income
(1)
Predicting State Democratic Party Economic Issues
(2)
(3)
0.387
(0.463)
Middle Income
0.865***
(0.302)
High Income
Constant
0.482***
(0.131)
0.377***
(0.0777)
1.198***
(0.281)
0.274***
(0.0769)
Observations
Adj R2
47
-0.00655
47
0.136
47
0.273
Part B
Repub Partisans’
Preferences
Low Income
(1)
Predicting State Republican Party Economic Issues
(2)
(3)
0.851***
(0.269)
Middle Income
0.997***
(0.300)
High Income
Constant
Observations
Adj R2
-0.539***
(0.0418)
47
0.164
-0.322***
(0.0984)
1.290***
(0.251)
-0.0448
(0.117)
47
47
0.179
0.356
Standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
25
(4)
-0.620
(0.620)
0.702
(0.507)
0.906**
(0.355)
0.351**
(0.138)
47
0.271
(4)
0.350
(0.298)
-0.178
(0.419)
1.219***
(0.373)
-0.0940
(0.125)
47
0.348
Table 2A (continued). Within Party Income Group Effects on State Party Policy
Positions
Part C
Dem Partisans’
Preferences
Low Income
(1)
Predicting State Democratic Party Social Issues
(2)
(3)
1.632***
(0.209)
Middle Income
1.705***
(0.159)
High Income
Constant
Observations
Adj R2
Part D
Repub Partisans’
Preferences
Low Income
0.257***
(0.0459)
-0.00671
(0.0533)
1.867***
(0.143)
-0.364***
(0.0686)
47
0.565
47
0.712
47
0.785
(1)
Predicting State Republican Party Social Issues
(2)
(3)
1.612***
(0.232)
Middle Income
1.326***
(0.144)
High Income
Constant
Observations
Adj R2
-0.0249
(0.0900)
47
0.507
-0.129**
(0.0585)
1.132***
(0.150)
-0.286***
(0.0520)
47
47
0.646
0.550
Standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
26
(4)
-0.159
(0.401)
-0.0146
(0.662)
2.017***
(0.536)
-0.407***
(0.114)
47
0.777
(4)
0.0981
(0.445)
1.288***
(0.420)
-0.0248
(0.378)
-0.114
(0.0943)
47
0.630
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1
(See Achen and Bartels 2016for an extensive discussion of the shortcomings of citizen thinking.) .
29
2
This is only to observe that if candidates converge in a Downsian fashion to the median voter, the electorate (a)
has no opportunity to bring about systematic policy change, and (b) such handy heuristics as party labels then have
no, or very little, policy meaning. Of course, we know that convergence, while it offers some payoff in the general
elections, remains the exception rather than the rule.
3
Those five states are: Wyoming (N=307), Delaware (N=344), North Dakota (N=358), South Dakota (N=421), and
Vermont (N=437).
4
See Rigby and Wright (2011; 2013) for several validity checks and discussion of the economic and social ideology
scales.
5
This is important because differences in the variances of explanatory variables at different levels of analysis can
alter the relative importance of those explanatory factors (Wright 1989a). Although not directly relevant to the
analysis here, these differences imply that social issues may play a larger role in accounting for the behavior of
state electorates than is the case at the individual level where analysts report that economic issues are clearly
dominant in voter decision making (Ansolabehere, et al. 2006, Bartels 2006).
6
This involves a method developed by Bhatti and Erikson (2011) where the preferences of income terciles are a
weighted average of the mean preferences (by state) across the income response categories. For example, if the
proportions of all valid respondents on question Q are .1, .15 and .15 in the lowest three income response
categories, and the mean response to Q for these income groupings is .8, .6 and .5 respectively, then we can
estimate the bottom tercile response for Q as (.1*.8 + .15*.6 + .083*.5)/.333 where .083=.333-.1-.15.
7
We use the equation: Y = a + b1D + b2PCT + b3PCT2 + b4D*PCT + b5D*PCT2 where Y is policy preference , (economic
or social), D is an indicator variable for party, and PCT the respondent’s income percentile in the state.
30